In an indoor environment such as a large house or an office, a single access point (AP) often may not be able to cover the entire indoor area.
One straightforward attempt to solve the problem is to increase the transmission power. However, solely relying on increasing the transmission power on the AP would be a poor solution. In addition to regulatory bodies that limit the transmission power of the AP, it is typical that the wireless local area network (WLAN) communications link between an AP and a clients is highly asymmetrical, that is, the client's transmission power is usually lower than the AP's transmission power. The client's antenna efficiency conventionally is also lower than the AP. Moreover, a portable client (e.g., a mobile phone) often is hand held by a user, and because of the signal absorption and disruption by the human body, signals from such portable client may reach the AP at even lower powers. Yet, many commonly used WLAN protocols require each side of the link to receive an acknowledgement (ACK) for the packets that are transmitted (e.g., in a downlink direction). If one side of the WLAN link cannot receive from the other side of the link, no packet can be transmitted to the other side of the link.
Instead of one AP with high transmission power and high performance antennas, an attractive alternative is using a multitude of smaller APs that are deployed in the environment in a scattered, distributed manner. These smaller APs form a wireless mesh network, and therefore are also called “mesh points.” When a client device establishes connection with one of the mesh points, the mesh points can forward the traffic to the mesh point that is connected to the gateway, which in turn communicates the traffic to the outside world (e.g., wide area network (WAN) and/or “the Internet”). However, there are also many challenges associated with implementing these wireless mesh networks, especially in a home environment where a layman user may be involved in installing and configuring these mesh points.
Like reference numerals refer to corresponding parts throughout the figures and specification.